Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy

CHAPTER VII Against UNESCO: Italia n Eugenics and American Scientific Racism

353 Outlining the problem The fight against racism has been a constituent aspect of UNESCO’s actions since its inception. In 1946, while defining the philosophical guidelines of the young UN affiliated organization, UNESCO’s first director general, British naturalist Julian Huxley, set the conciliation of the ethical and political principles of equality with the biological fact of diversity as an objective. In the following years, staff at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters found themselves involved in an attempt to defeat racial prejudice by demonstrating the lack of scientific base for the very concept of race. This proved an arduous task that would ultimately bring forth a struggle within the international scientific community and that would culminate in the publication of two “Statements on Race” within a short period of time, in 1950 and in 1951.1 Scholars have highlighted a substantial lack of academic consideration within Italy of UNESCO’s two “Statements on Race,” which went practically unnoticed by a scientific body still permeated by the legacy of fascism.2 Deeper research, however, suggests this to be deliberate silence from the Italian scientific community as a result of outright adversity toward UNESCO ’s policy. If, for instance, the “Statements” never raised the attention of either the Archivio per l’Antropologia e l’Etnologia [Journal of anthropology and ethnology] or the Rivista di Antropologia [Review of Anthropology]— organs of the Florentine and Roman schools, respectively3 —it must be considered notable that relevant Italian circles of medical genetics and social 1 For an in-depth reconstruction of the whole matter, see Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza, 145–210. 2 Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza, 191. 3 Pogliano, L’ossessione della razza, 191. C H A P T E R V I I AGAINST UNESCO ITALIAN EUGENICS AND AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC RACISM med_03___ok.indd 353 2011-04-12 13:33:09 354 CHAPTER VII sciences nevertheless objectively converged on the positions of AngloAmerican scientific racism. By selecting scientific arguments as the core of its anti-racist campaign, UNESCO had, for all intents and purposes, suggested to American and European racist movements the possibility of a new camouflage strategy: racism and the pursuit of “white supremacy,” just like anti-racist ideologies , had to be based on scientific evidence, threatened as they were by civil rights campaigns in the USA and steady decolonization in Africa and Asia. The main expression of such scientific racism was represented by the establishment of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE)4 and its publication The Mankind Quarterly. 1. The IAAEE and The Mankind Quarterly (1959–1965) The IAAEE was founded on 24 April 1959 in Baltimore. Its chairman was Robert E. Kuttner, the secretary was Anthony James Gregor, and the treasurer was Donald A. Swan. The executive committee comprised Robert Gayre, Reginald Ruggles Gates, Henry E. Garrett, Charles C. Tansill, Heinrich Quiring and the Italian demographer and statistician Corrado Gini. The first issue of The Mankind Quarterly, organ of the IAAEE based in Edinburgh , was published in June 1960, with Robert Gayre as editor, and Garrett and Gates as associate editors. The segregationist scientists in the IAAEE shared some common traits. First, in many cases they held important academic positions. For example, Henry E. Garrett had been chairman of the American Psychological Association in 1946, was a member of the US National Research Council and from 1941 to 1955 was head of the Psychology Faculty at Columbia University.5 4 On the IAAEE, see Barry Mehler, “Foundations for Fascism: The New Eugenics Movement in the United States,” Patterns of Prejudice 23 (1989): 17–25; William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Michael Billig, Psychology, Racism and Fascism (Birmingham: Searchlight, 1979); John P. Jackson, Jr., Science for Segregation. Race, Law and the case against Brown v. Board of Education (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 5 William H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism. Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund (Urbana–Champaign : University of Illinois Press, 2002), 79. med_03___ok.indd 354 2011-04-12 13:33:10 355 The IAAEE and The Mankind Quarterly Similarly, Reginald Ruggles Gates, botanist, geneticist and anthropologist , professor at King’s College London and Harvard University, had been an outspoken advocate of morphological, biological and psychological differences between human races since the 1930s.6 Second, they all had relationships with the neo-Nazi and neo-fascist extreme right­ wing...